---
title: Videos as Inputs
description: How to use the Video in scripts
sidebar:
  order: 10.01
hero:
  image:
    alt: "A small, square, flat-design icon features simplified shapes: a film
      strip, camera, and scissors grouped to indicate video cutting; a jagged
      line for an audio waveform to suggest audio extraction; and a plain
      rectangle representing extracted video frames. The icon uses a basic,
      8-bit, 5-color palette, all in a geometric, corporate style, with no
      background, people, or text."
    file: ./videos.png

---

While most LLMs do not support videos natively, they can be integrated in scripts by rendering frames
and adding them as images to the prompt. This can be tedious and GenAIScript provides efficient helpers
to streamline this process.

## ffmpeg configuration

The functionalities to render and analyze videos rely on [ffmpeg](https://ffmpeg.org/)
and [ffprobe](https://ffmpeg.org/ffprobe.html).

On Linux, you can try

```sh
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
```

Make sure these tools are installed locally and available in your PATH,
or configure the `FFMPEG_PATH` / `FFPROBE_PATH` environment variables to point to the `ffmpeg`/`ffprobe` executable.

## Extracting frames

As mentionned above, multi-modal LLMs typically support images as a sequence
of frames (or screenshots).

The `ffmpeg.extractFrames` will render frames from a video file
and return them as an array of file paths. You can use the result with `defImages` directly.

- by default, extract keyframes (intra-frames)

```js
const frames = await ffmpeg.extractFrames("path_to_video")
defImages(frames)
```

- specify a number of frames using `count`

```js "count: 10"
const frames = await ffmpeg.extractFrames("...", { count: 10 })
```

- specify timestamps in seconds or percentages of the video duration using `timestamps` (or `times`)

```js "timestamps"
const frames = await ffmpeg.extractFrames("...", {
    timestamps: ["00:00", "05:00"],
})
```

- specify the transcript computed by the [transcribe](/genaiscript/reference/scripts/transcription) function. GenAIScript
  will extract a frame at the start of each segment.

```js "timestamps"
const transcript = await transcribe("...")
const frames = await ffmpeg.extractFrames("...", { transcript })
```

- specify a scene threshold (between 0 and 1)

```js "sceneThreshold"
const transcript = await transcribe("...", { sceneThreshold: 0.3 })
```

## Extracting audio

The `ffmpeg.extractAudio` will extract the audio from a video file
as a `.wav` file.

```js
const audio = await ffmpeg.extractAudio("path_to_video")
```

The conversion to audio happens automatically
for videos when using [transcribe](/genaiscript/reference/scripts/transcription).

## Extracting clips

You can extract a clip from a video file using `ffmpeg.extractClip`.

```js
const clip = await ffmpeg.extractClip("path_to_video", {
    start: "00:00:10",
    duration: 5,
})
```

:::note

This operation is quite fast as it does not require any reencoding. You can specify
the output size but this will be much slower as it will require re-encoding.

:::

## Probing videos

You can extract metadata from a video file using `ffmpeg.probe`.

```js
const info = await ffmpeg.probe("path_to_video")
const { duration } = info.streams[0]
console.log(`video duration: ${duration} seconds`)
```

## Custom ffmpeg options

You can further customize the `ffmpeg` configuration
by passing `outputOptions`.

```js 'outputOptions: "-b:a 16k",'
const audio = await ffmpeg.extractAudio("path_to_video", {
    outputOptions: "-b:a 16k",
})
```

Or interact directly with the `ffmpeg` command builder
(which is the native [fluent-ffmpeg](https://www.npmjs.com/package/fluent-ffmpeg) command builder).
Note that in this case, you should also provide a cache "hash" to avoid re-rendering.

```js wrap
const custom = await ffmpeg.run(
    "src/audio/helloworld.mp4",
    (cmd) => {
        cmd.noAudio()
        cmd.keepDisplayAspectRatio()
        cmd.autopad()
        cmd.size(`200x200`)
        return "out.mp4"
    },
    { cache: "kar-200x200" }
)
```

## CLI

The [cli](/genaiscript/reference/cli/video) supports various command to run the video transformations.

```sh
genaiscript video probe myvid.mp4
```
